Chapter Seven
Sherlock stared at the screen, barely breathing. The rage was clear on his face, and, when it appeared he had stopped breathing, John became worried by his friend's reaction.
"Okay…," he murmured, "Well, that was… cryptic. Well at least we know one thing. Whoever your, er, admirer is, he's certainly got a sense of humor."
Sherlock looked at John, his angry trance broken, perplexed at this strange notion. His eyes, which normally would be swimming with some sort of analysis of his surroundings, appeared vaguely blank, as if his mind was still trying to catch up on what he had just read on the computer screen and was currently functioning under auto-pilot.
"Puzzles, John. I have always respected them. However, in this case… not so much." His eyes were flicking across the letters on the screen, looking for a pattern.
Nodding, John raised his eyebrows and let out a sigh. "So you know what it is, then?"
"Of course I know what it is. I've never not known what it is, John. It's perfectly obvious, it should be even to you that it's a cipher. The question is not what is it, the question is what does it mean." His tone was slowly picking up bits of passion as his mind whirred, running the letters through his mind in every type of cipher he knew, drawing a blank at all.
Irritation mounting at Sherlock's continued insults, John huffed. "Right. Perfectly obvious. My bad."
Declining to respond, Sherlock held out his hand expectantly. When John did nothing, he gave him a sharp look. "Pen. Didn't you hear me?"
"You didn't say anything, Sherlock," John angrily muttered as he grabbed a pen off the nearest table and resisted the urge to stab it stylus side down onto the detective's palm. Angry as he was with his friend, he still watched mesmerized as his hand began flowingly to run across a sheet of paper, many times not being three or four letters in before he gave up that route and tried another type of cipher.
John looked away, shoulders dropping. He knew that he'd be useless in this situation, being rubbish at puzzles as he was, save the crossword puzzles from the paper. He focused on the grain of the wood table in front of him, tracing his eyes across the swirling patterns therein, drowning out Sherlock's angry mutters in his thoughts.
Two weeks. It had been a good two weeks since Sherlock's return. And while John was elated to have him back, and was hesitant to begin to discover a new side of emotion to his relationship with his friend, he wasn't quite sure how he felt about his disappearance. That sounded backwards to John even in his head so he tried to work through it.
He'd been peeved, of course, when Sherlock had jumped off the roof of St. Bart's Hospital. No? Was he? Had he been peeved? He hadn't, he'd been sad. So was the anger bitterness at his return, then? And didn't that mean that he hadn't truly forgiven him yet?
But then Sherlock's words would come rushing back to him, telling him that he was his one true anything, which made John's heart react in ways that he really wished it wouldn't. One damn problem at a time, he sharply thought in attempt to get himself to focus.
Had that been some of Sherlock's famous manipulation? He had to have known that deep down John would have a difficult time adjusting and accepting his reentry into his life, and that anger would slowly start to surface. Or had it been both, had Sherlock really truly felt that and only verbalized it because he was sure of John's impending reaction?
Three years. Sherlock had been gone three years. As that number went through his head, he did some quick math. He might not have the same mental capacity as his friend beside him, but he was a doctor and could manage simple addition, if not a bit slowly with larger numbers. 365 multiplied by three was 1,095. Add on roughly another thirty days as he'd been gone for thirty seven months, you'd get 1,125. Then subtract five because of February, and one of those years had been a leap year. That gave a grand total of 1,120.
1,120 days of John waking up from hell having dreamed of Sherlock's fall every night. That was 26,880 hours of remorse for every time he told Sherlock off for putting body parts in the kitchen, of painstaking brainstorming to see if there was any way he could have saved his friend.
Because it never really had stopped. He never really had stopped hurting. When Sherlock jumped from the roof of that building, he'd not only assumed that John and Molly and Lestrade would accept his death, but that they would all get over it.
And quite frankly, that made him the biggest prat John had ever known in his life.
Everybody John saw in his day would walk about, and at some point in their life, they would have thought 'I hope that someone remembers me, that it hurts someone, everyone, for a good long while. I want to be important, if not to the world, to my friends, my family.' But Sherlock? No. Sherlock was under the self-important assumption that he knew best and that, being a highly functioning sociopath as he called himself – a load of crap, John mentally added, as the self diagnosis was not only wrong fundamentally but John was sure Sherlock knew himself how wrong it was – his loss to the world would be as unremarkable as anything else.
Which was quite ironic, seeing as Sherlock was always reminding them how downright important he was.
"John?" Sherlock's irritated tone yanked John from his thoughts, and he blinked a few times, his head jerking to the source of Sherlock's voice. "Would you have a go?"
Shaking his head a few times, John thought he might have misheard. "Sorry, what?"
Annoyed, his friend repeated himself slowly, as if John was incompetent. "I said, would you have a go? I can't figure it out and sometimes, when you say things, even when they're completely off the mark, it helps me."
Not completely sure if that was an insult or a compliment, John let out a gust of air, trying to clear his mind. "Sherlock, this isn't really my area."
"Like I said. Even when they're off the mark. Now hurry up, for all we know, our dearest article writer is on the verge of death."
John raised his eyebrows skeptically at Sherlock's choice of words. "Since when do you care if some journalist dies?"
"I don't," Sherlock replied easily, nonchalantly. "But you do." John sighed again, closing his eyes. "Oh, come now, John, here you are with the melodramatics again. You don't really expect me to care, I know you don't. But you? You never really stop caring about saving people."
Malarkey. "Sherlock…." Having lost his angry thought, John turned to the computer, almost stubbornly wishing to not see anything in the words before him.
YPTYOMARAOEQL OEWTRBNECRMUY ULEWTEDEKBEII RMNOHRSTDANCO EETNULTBOSTKU
"It's a cipher," he repeated, just to be sure, glancing over at his friend to see the reaction, almost positive it would be nonverbal as Sherlock's face was buried in his palms. The detective gave a single curt nod. "And you've tried everything you know."
"Yes!" he practically moaned, considering looking for nicotine patches as he was in need of his fix. "Of course, I could go back further and try others. I'm sure there are other, more obscure ciphers out there that I picked up on once… they must be somewhere in my-"
John cut him off almost rudely. "Maybe that's the point. Maybe that's the point that you wouldn't recognize the cipher. Because it's not a real cipher."
Peering over his palms, Sherlock, irritated, responded. "What are you attempting to imply? Of course it's a real cipher. What else could it be?"
Shaking his head slowly, John bit his lip. "I'm not saying it's not a cipher. I'm saying it's not a real cipher. It's not based on some code you already know. Or, if it is, the code has been tweaked. Something just difficult enough that you'll pick up on it, but only after a fair bit of mental agony."
Lowering his hands, Sherlock stared at the screen from where he was sitting. Could that be it? It was simple, but John's reasoning made sense. But then why put him through all of that? If the entire goal was to get him to decode the message in time to save the reporter, why make the message so difficult to decode?
And why was this case so difficult to work through? There was something he'd done a long, long time ago, before he'd met John, that would help him when he'd have a block by forcing him to not think about it for a bit.
No, he couldn't do that to John. It'd destroy him. Sherlock's mind buzzed right back to the way John had looked at him the other day.
Trying to physically make himself pay attention to the problem at hand, he moved closer to the computer screen. Taking a new glance at the words, he nodded his head slowly, catching a single pattern.
"Ah…." He slowly drew out the filler, nodding his head as he reached numbly for the pen. Ripping the paper from under John's hand, he scribbled out a graph, muttering the letters as he wrote them to keep his mind on task.
John stared perplexedly at the paper as he tried to stifle his irritation at the detective's rudeness, ignoring the unpleasant scratching noises the pen made as he carelessly drew it across the paper, marking a clear graph.
But despite the seemingly careless manner of his writing the words down, Sherlock somehow managed to be graceful as he did so. The light was dim enough in the room that John could just see the tendons moving in his hand as it attractively swiveled and spun in a sophisticated grace across the white sheet. He found himself incapable of tearing his eyes away.
Sherlock huffed, annoyed, as he crossed out the first set and started over, drawing a table with ease. John couldn't believe with what simplicity drawing perfectly straight lines came to him, it was as if he had traced them.
"You were right, John," Sherlock murmured as he started writing out answer to the cipher. His voice had all the repressed enthusiasm of someone who was genuinely surprised but didn't want to appear outright condescending, something that ordinarily would have made John smile as Sherlock rarely was so kind. "I must admit, I'm a bit impressed. How did you figure?"
Having been still mesmerized by Sherlock's hand, John didn't quite catch the question. "I'm sorry?"
Amusedly irritated, the detective smirked. "How did you figure it wouldn't be a normal cipher?" Even as he spoke, his mind was alight with theories, hundreds of possibilities flying about as he tried to pick the top three theories.
One, John had found a new interest in Cold War documentaries. Highly unlikely. As a doctor, he'd find little use for such information and little time to entertain himself with it. Besides, Sherlock would have heard it coming from the telly if it had been recently.
Two, John was behind this. Unlikely if not impossible.
Three, Sherlock was starting to rub off on him. That will be the day. Intelligence of my sort is geologically founded, perfectly hereditary, not socially gained. Impossible.
His top three theories being discarded, Sherlock peered up at John as he finished writing, awaiting his answer expectantly. "Well?" he demanded when John still hadn't answered.
Actually, John looked rather confused by the question. "I'm not quite sure what you mean, frankly. I mean… when I was a kid, Harry used to be obsessed with Cold War relics and whatnot. Actually, she was still upset when she found we didn't do that in the army regularly, so I guess it wasn't a childhood faze. I guess... I just remembered hearing about all the fake codes they'd put through to fool everyone on the other side of the Iron Curtain."
Slightly taken aback, Sherlock blurted a question before showing John the cipher's answer. "Your sister enjoyed working with code?" His tone was almost skeptical, something he knew could be interpreted as offensive, but he didn't care, too amused.
"Yes. Sherlock, what's this about?"
Raising his eyebrows and shaking his head, the detective dropped the subject immediately, his mind finally working on all thrusters at the answer before him. "Grab your coat. We're headed to twenty-two Northumberland Street."
No longer willing to mask his irritation, John snapped a response. "No, no, Sherlock, I am not. Not until I know what the hell that note says."
Not responding, Sherlock popped up and headed for his coat, leaving the paper lying on the desk, confident that John would join him.
"Oh, my God," John murmured as he read what was on the paper, stubbing his toe as he bolted from the computer to his coat and accidentally hooked his leg around the table.
YOU REPEL ME. TWENTY-TWO NORTHUMBERLAND STREET. QUICKLY. IOU.
